As many in our office at Monterey Language Services—including our director—are alumni of the Middlebury Institute, we join the career fair every year to speak to promising students and other alumni who attend the event. Those involved ranged from conference interpreters to patent translators or localization project managers, and each one spoke with lots of enthusiasm and eagerness about their experiences and hopes for the future.

The career fair takes months of planning to invite and coordinate the attending companies. When the doors initially opened at 8:00AM for preparation, we were there to set up. As in years past when the event was live, we prioritized mobility with our booth—with our information placed on the table, we were free to walk around the booth and meet attendees at eye-level. One attendee mentioned that it made them feel much more at ease to speak with company employees while we were all standing, rather than speaking with company employees who were sitting.

Our booth was a roaring success. Between the official hours of the fair, 9:00AM-12:00PM, a never-ending multitude of people came to inquire about our positions. It was a treat to meet such friendly faces and discover talent from across the globe. We hope and know that regardless of the positions these students and alumni earn, they will achieve great careers.

We would like to thank not only the attendees, but also the staff at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies for making this event such a success. We know that many, including ourselves, were eager to come to the career fair in-person after such a long time away, and we think that it could not have been better. Thank you.

Interestingly, this specific order might not affect translators all that much. Most translators already complete most of their work remotely. Translation does not need to be done in person, so many translators live in their home country, or in a country whose language they translate into.

Interpreters are significantly and directly impacted by the COVID-19 virus and stay-at-home orders. While there are remote interpretation services (such as phone and video interpretation), a majority of interpreters still complete most of their work in person. This is no longer possible for most interpretation jobs. In order to support interpreters, LSPs and the interpreters themselves should work with clients to set up remote services, including video and phone interpretation. There are many online platforms available, which our interpreters are familiar with. They are ready to offer services using these platforms, so that they can still provide necessary interpretations in a safe way.

Of course, this stay-at-home order doesn’t just affect linguists. It affects everyone who works in the companies that provide language services: project managers, vendor managers, localization engineers, sales teams, etc. At Monterey Language Services, we have many years of experience in working from home. While some of our operations do take place in our physical Monterey office, we also have several employees who already work remotely full time.

Working from home presents a major lifestyle change for many people. It does require people to learn how to balance life and work and how to maintain their energy and strive to reach their goals at work. In our experience, when employees are working remotely, it is not important to track employees’ actions and tasks every minute of the day; micromanaging is not an effective strategy. Rather, it is about everyone having a common goal and working toward that common goal comfortably yet effectively. It’s about managing tasks rather than managing people.

Working effectively from home requires various technological resources. We optimize our technology to help us successfully work from home; we use our virtual private network (VPN) to share and access files, we keep open channels of communication via apps on our work phones, and more. We are working hard to remain available to our clients who need our services, and to provide as much support as we can to the translators and interpreters that we work with.

During times like these, staying connected is more important than ever. We need to support language professionals and continue providing translation and interpretation services, so that people can stay informed and connected throughout the world, even if this connection is remote!

Monterey Language Services is offering a full-time project management position, to manage translation and interpretation projects in a large number of languages.

We are looking for a MATURE, ENERGETIC, SELF-MOTIVATED, AND RESPONSIBLE person with the following experience/requirements:

• At least one year of experience handling multilingual projects in the TRANSLATION & INTERPRETATION business
• Has a great sense of responsibility and passion about working as Project Manager
• Able to cooperate with others as well as work independently
• Good English communication skills – both written and verbal
• Experience using SDL Trados or similar as a Project Manager
• Experience using interpreter scheduling software is welcomed
• Likes working with technology and tools

If you are interested, please email your COVER LETTER, Resume and recent salary history to Mei-Ling Chen, Director of Translation, at mei-ling@montereylanguages.com

Monterey Language Services
www.montereylanguages.com

Put yourselves in the shoes of their website’s visitors, and you will find out what they are thinking: “Cool! This website is in my native language! I can breeze effortlessly through anything in this website, even when I’m not in my home country! I will definitely visit this website again!”

When your website speaks their languages, they can browse through your website easily. They come and stay. That’s it. Better yet, they can see your website easily, even when they type the keywords in their own languages in the search box!

You can have great website traffic and new customers! We are here to help! Monterey Language Services is equipped with a strong team of experienced project managers, expert translators, quality assurance specialists, marketing professionals, and localization engineers to give you a multilingual website!

Contact us and embrace a flood of visitors to your website and welcome new customers to your company! The website localization services that we provide specifically aim to achieve the above goals.

1. Translate website content clearly and accurately
2. Translate all SEO content in order to rank high in search results
3. Maintain translation of the website to keep them up to date
4. Keep records of previous translation and reuse them

Connect and communicate with your customers who speak languages other than English! We cannot wait to hear you tell us about all the new leads that your website brings in!

To see more details about website SEO (Search Engine Optimization), please see our article on GALA (Globalization and Localization Association), a well-known association in localization industry:

http://www.gala-global.org/press-release/improving-world-economy-increases-need-e-commerce-translation

Before the curtain opens, there is a lot of preparation to be done. From selecting a team of conference interpreters, putting together interpretation equipment & the audio and video system, setting up interpreter rooms or interpreter booths, to studying the conference materials in advance, there must be an architecture, a design, a goal in order to achieve the best result in a conference interpretation assignment.

With so many aspects involved, conference interpretation is a perfect example of a team at work.  A team consists of project managers, interpreters, engineers, technicians and conference organizers. Orchestration becomes such a complicated task that it requires a division of work and a smaller team within the team.  Therefore, a conference interpretation event is usually supported by a group of professionals rather than a single-handed individual effort.

At Monterey Language Services, a simulation is often conducted before a conference interpretation event goes live.  This quality check process is valuable to ensure that we contribute to the success of a conference.  From one successful event to another, we have had many wonderful experiences and truly enjoyed every part of conference interpretation.  We are proud to call “conference interpretation services” one of our best expertise!

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.